Interview with Letizia Chiappini on psycho digital geography

Lou: Let’s start with introductions. Tell me a little bit about yourself.

Letizia: I moved to Amsterdam eight years ago for my PhD, a double degree in sociology from the University of Milan and geography at the GPIO (Human Geography, Planning and International Development) department at UvA, where I spent four years. After that, I researched alternative urban digital platforms - not Airbnb or Uber Eats per se - but to see what kind of alternative digitalization processes we can observe besides the capitalist one. From there, I was quite interested in also thinking about how this shows in the creative industry. I was a lecturer at the University of Applied Sciences in Utrecht while finishing my PhD and founded a collective called Slutty Urbanism, criticizing from a feminist perspective the city as body and vice versa - bodies and cities commodified. We were trying to unpack and dismantle this in a more provocative, non-academic way. After that, I got a position at Twente University (in Enschede) as assistant professor in digitalization and sustainability, in June 2023. In between, I focused on writing my book, away from the academic rush to become a professor. I thought this was a good moment to put all my ideas together and re-question my initial research interest. That’s why I came to NIAS (Netherlands Institute for Adcanced Study in Humanities and Social Science) with this project, initially called Psycho Digital Geography: Rituals and Digital Literacy in Amsterdam, but it’s ongoing. I’m also rethinking doom scrolling - not so much about rituals, but how to put it in a critical way to maybe exit doom scrolling. That’s my journey to here.

Lou: What is your relationship to Amsterdam as an Italian woman?

Letizia: I was in Denmark before coming to the Netherlands. I did part of my master’s there, a two-year research master. I’ve been fascinated since I became aware of what it means to be a woman and have a female body in a city. I never had the privilege to be invisible. Italy is a place where you experience everything from catcalling to insults while driving - your appearance is always in front. I didn’t want to experience that long-term. In Denmark, I felt different - I felt safe in the city. I was in a small town, Aalborg, but still. That was 10 years ago. I never forgot that feeling. For me, Amsterdam is another place where I feel safe. Not invisible per se, but I would say there’s a capacity in the city and its citizens to be more respectful.

Lou: What exactly is Psycho Digital Geography?

Letizia: I started from the Situationist ideas of Guy Debord - psychogeography and urban wandering - a person with the privilege and capacity to wander, absorb knowledge, and experience how spatial planning and cultural fabric affect the behavior of an indivdual. The Situationists asked how to use the city differently. Mapping was the first attempt, especially with The Naked City (a psychogeographical map of Paris published by Debord in 1957). They were based in Paris and London. Then there was Michèle Bernstein, Guy Debord’s wife, who was really the brain behind much of his work. He had a reputation for being a grumpy drunk, but he was privileged. Starting from Baudelaire’s masculine or naïve flâneur figure, they explored how to drift in the city. But they had that privilege because they were men. That friction made me think: there’s room to rethink this from a gender perspective.

I asked, what happens now when digital is the filter, when our smartphones are the filter to this kind of law or position of the city? I couldn’t avoid thinking about my own practices and doomscrolling. Psychogeographers asked how to break the mundane in a city. I asked: how to break the mundane digitally? Is doomscrolling breaking it? Is avoiding Google Maps breaking it? But then being completely codependent on this technology and getting even more anxiety if you don’t have it, or if you do have, or if you don’t…our choices are mediated by an algorithmic kind of dictation. 

How can we discuss technology, the city and bodies in a way that we reclaim them for collective purposes? Commercial platforms push for automation and individualism. You become a DJ or Uber rider, you shop on Amazon from time to time and become the perfect digital citizen. But what is our digital citizenship in that sense? What can we do in this space?

Using this Psycho Digital Geography lens, we can look at food, dating, intimacy, cultural activities. How do we relate to these through this lens? Also to propose a critique like, how can we starve machine learning? How can we stop feeding platforms the data they need to tell us what to do?

Lou: Amsterdam is often called a “smart city” and there’s a big emphasis on innovation, which the Dutch have held near and dear for centuries. So, what can a Psycho Digital Geography approach reveal about the future of Amsterdam as a city?

Letizia: I must say Amsterdam was always a bit cool in doing that and playing the role of also proposing an alternative to this “smart city” paradigm. I think the local fabric - all the actors that are promoting an alternative vision of Amsterdam - are still relevant. For example, De Waag and OT301, even the journal that you are part of, all pay attention to these alternative visions of smart city. So I wouldn’t consider Amsterdam super aligned with the critique that I have for the smart city, but I see Amsterdam as a  double-transformation city, in which you have a very attractive city center for tourists and then also aesthetically you don’t see anything. 

You know, Amsterdam is not a real city - it’s like The Truman Show, everything is perfect. I mean, there is trash in the morning, but then it’s clean. It’s a front-stage city. It presents all these shiny, innovative projects. But Psycho Digital Geography asks us to remove that shiny cover and look underneath - at the inequalities, the spatial unevenness. Bijlmer and the outer areas - those are Amsterdam too. Would you do a tourist tour in Bijlmer? No. This approach says: let’s ditch the platforms and see for ourselves. Why not experience different parts of the city? Let’s not limit ourselves to the canal belt. Let’s show other parts of Amsterdam. Liberate it from what I call the “disneyfication” of the city center. It’s not even gentrification - it’s Disney.

Lou: It really doesn’t feel like it’s for the residents either.

Letizia: No. When I’m cycling, I see tourists taking photos - it’s all facade and front stage. But the backstage is tough - housing, students, inequalities - like every global city. Amsterdam just does a fancy cover-up.

Lou: In your essay Collective Pleasure Against Platform Dystopia, you say platforms replace traditional social spaces like bars and cafes. How is this unfolding in Amsterdam, and how can we counter it?

Letizia: I think about a city’s function and mutual solidarity - a social fabric where help doesn’t come from the state or private actors. Platforms reinforce automation. You could ask your neighbor for groceries, but Flink promises delivery in 10 minutes. The platform satisfies this commercial idea that users are lazy. But what are they really doing - saving time, or optimizing society to isolate us? Then there’s user agency. But sitting in a bar and interacting, flirting, is different than using Tinder. Tinder becomes more logical than talking in a bar.

Lou: Tell me about the collective Slutty Urbanism. Why focus on the concept of the “slut”?

Letizia: We started the collective in 2018, as we were fed up with being expected to talk in a certain way as academic women. We asked, what’s provocative? Also, we admit to using Airbnb or certain platforms - we’re slutty in our choices. You can’t be perfectly ethical. What’s ethical, and for whom? It’s also a critique of The Ethical Slut book (published by Dossie Easton and Janet Hardy in 1997). I can go out dressed as I want and use platforms without being judged - “you’re an academic, how can you use platforms?” 

“Slut” is also very similar to “witch” in that sense, with this kind of double identity and witch hunting and the war against women. We also said that women have been accused of gossiping a lot. So for me, gossiping against Trump and the “broligarchy” is so important. We are going to keep gossiping. We need to be gossiping about them. It’s true that gossping is also negative, it can be an elite way to keep a power relationship stable or unstable, but then in a very witchy, crafty way, we are really going to conspire against them; we need our witchcraft in our technology for this.

Lou: In your work, you talk about how collective pleasure - what you call “communal luxury” - resists the individualism embedded in Silicon Valley. Why is it important to approach this from an embodied perspective?

Letizia: Silicon Valley’s discourse is all about self: self-entrepreneur, self-maker. But that’s how they destroy us, if we’re only a self. Alliances aren’t visible in that narrative. Communal luxury and solidarity are neglected. A clear example is the lack of connection between higher education protests and pro-Palestine demonstrations. Without alliances, without intersectionality, people are weakened.

Lou: Any advice on how we as a city can work toward more collective pleasure or communal luxury?

Letizia: Talking about it is already a big deal. Make the uncomfortable visible. That can be critique of institutions or communities, for example. Awareness and literacy are key. Understand your role when using your phone in a place. Reflect on what I call “digital literacies”. I may need a book on Amazon, but maybe I can find it at a local bookstore. The urgency is algorithmic pressure. It’s not just how you use tech, but what it does to you and the city. 

Ask yourself: what can I use differently, and how intensely? What can I do for my city to make it more pleasant? Use the parks, the local amenities. The urban, political culture here is pleasant. What if we revamp those values and put them into tech? Platforms are coded—they don’t auto-generate individualism. There’s a pattern. But awareness is a step.